Why We Changed Our First-Time Guest Gift

I’m a long-time believer in first-time guest gifts. They’re an easy way to say thank you to a guest for trusting you with their time.

But a few years back, I became convinced that our gift didn’t really carry a lot of meaning with our first-time guests. It was a Starbucks-styled double walled cold cup tumbler, the kind of thing that is useful enough and fairly practical. But there was just one problem: it had our obnoxiously-large logo on one side of the cup, and our obnoxiously-large website on the other.

Think about the message there: Thanks for your visit. Now go forth and advertise on our behalf.

This article served as a wake-up call to me. A Saturday morning stroll through my local Goodwill became a game of “How many Summit FTG cups will I see today?” (Hint: the answer was too many.) I realized that we were creating emotional attachments that our guests didn’t care about.

And those aha moments were all well and good. I was convinced of what we probably shouldn’t do. Now the question became, What do we do?

Discovering the next gift

The solution came from sister churches. Our friends at Calvary Baptist Church in Winston-Salem rolled out a different kind of tumbler, one with their city’s skyline and a teeny-tiny version of their logo. I liked that it capitalized their community and minimized their advertising. It was the kind of thing I’d expect to see in a local store in the Triad area, and the kind of thing I’d actually buy.

Then I saw the first-time guest cup from Two Cities Church, also in Winston. It seemed like the right size for our bag and the right price for our budget, and was an attractive product that both coffee drinkers and non-coffee aficionados could get their hands around (pun intended).

The next step was to go to our Creative Team with the idea. I liked the skyline concept, but what do you do when you have thirteen campuses (and more to come) spread across multiple cities and communities?

Their solution: they pulled the best icons from across our region and created one wraparound mashup skyline:

With this design, first-time guests from Raleigh could see their New Year’s acorn (why is that a thing), guests from Chapel Hill could pick out the Old Well, and us folks in the Dirty D got our beloved bull and water tower.

And if you squint really hard right at the center of the design, you can see our incredibly understated logo. Again, the idea was to maximize our presence in the community without making an advertising push the point of the gift.

(By the way, you can see the specs on that cup at 4Imprint, who we use for this particular item.)

So what does all of this mean for you?

Listen, I have zero issue with your logo being front-and-center on your coffee mug. I have a kitchen cabinet full of mugs from churches all over the country (in fact, some of them are my aesthetic favorites!).

But we came to the point where we wanted the gift to be something that would help our guests connect more with our city and less with our branding. And that led us on the journey to make a change.

Your first-time guest gift might be great. Maybe you don’t need to change it. But if you’re thinking about making a change (or if you don’t have one and are trying to figure out what to add), why not consider connecting your guests to their larger community as you invite them into a smaller one?

Want to see the full contents of our bag?

See this post for all the details.

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photo credits: Lindsey Love and Austin Franks